Are you using Facebook ads for your Martial Arts School page?

If you aren’t you should.

Some will argue that getting more fans on your page won’t correlate into sales. That purchasing ads are a waste of money. It may or may not have a profound effect on your direct sales. However it is an overarching spider web of virtual connectivity. Having a big social media presence at the very least will build your profile, have a place for people to congregate, and believe it or not extend your traffic much further than your own attempts could do. Having a brand and a Facebook page that has a high fan like count will help your credibility as well as search engine ranking. Having links that constantly link back to one of the biggest sites in the entire world will help you in your marketing attempts small and large. Considering that most people used to log on to the web to do a quick search about your place when they came across it. Now that has shifted to searching Facebook. If they have a FB page not only does it add credibility to your business it gives your school, a personality.

Take for example our Facebook page, when we first started we ran the same ad for months our price point per click increased and the effectiveness of it decreased over time.

In September we decided to switch gears and give a new strategy a try. To huge prevail. What we did was start constantly metering and editing our ads. We ran a/b tests and saw which set of ads did better, and why. We ran duplicate campaigns to see what ads did better across the same images, or text or a variation of either. Oddly the retail and consumer world is so super finicky, a word or 2 change and the entire ratio of the ad working changes.

What’s even more interesting is we found the over hyped sensational type ads didn’t work very well, the ones which seemed genuine and engaged worked much better.

This means an engaged and genuine approach in online marketing as well as physical marketing is a very powerful one. We are cynical as consumers these days and rightfully so. To connect we must first build trust and community. Our grandparents did get it right many decades ago. We are seeing a resurgence of unique genuine engagement, one on one, person to person, the age of the mom and pop shop in the 21st century, virtually.

A very exciting time.

Added Note: EdgeRank is the algorithm used by Facebook to generate your “positioning” as well as traffic. There has been whispers that Facebook wants you to pay for traffic through ads, and it seems as of the late changes where you can’t really see who has liked your page unless you spend $5-$10 dollars a day with them, this is here to stay. So what is EdgeRank? I will let the experts explain. Ultimately anytime you place anything from other sites organically onto your page, this is a good tactic, but if you are using a auto generate solution, this will harm your ranking. The reason it seems is that Facebook wants REAL people doing REAL interaction. This seems to be a trend in the way all of the web is moving these days. Google being the leader here, Google recently hit the world with another “SLAP” this time called the Penguin slap. Here is a quick blog post about it in simplistic terms.

Simply put it’s time to stop spending money and resources on trying to “figure out” what Google or bots want and START figuring out what your audience wants. I find this ideal to be refreshing. While some may have lost years worth of work, a lot of it was “short cut” work. Work to try and cut corners from the one single purpose of social media… Being Social. Being a real person with real ideas, and real thoughts, who has something of value to share with the world.